Your Hand in My Hand
by turtledoves
Summary: A collection of LGBTplus soul mate AU drabbles. /"Today, the ever-present mark on her wrist was fighting for her attention, trying to poke past the calm of the waves. Only one more month, it reminded her, before a speedboat tumbled the waves once more and she lost herself in their trails."
1. We Were Born With Crowns of Fate

**A soul mate AU in which** your soul mate's name is written on your left wrist if she's female and your right wrist if he's male.

 **The soul mates are** Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen.

:::

 **1 : We Were Not Born With Ankle Weights but Crowns of Fate**

:::

In one of the houses of pine and coal dust, under the waning moon, a newborn screams. As the mother leans back, tired eyes lifting to her daughter, her saint, her _Katniss_ , the midwife nods at the rise and fall of the baby's chest. She notes the pink in her skin, listens for the rapid heartbeat, tickles her foot to gage the response. The baby's arm flails in the air, and the midwife smiles at the recent parents, nods her head. The father bows his head to the mattress, squeezes his wife's hand in relief.

But the air clots, resting heavily on his shoulders, and he glances up again, where the midwife is frowning over his daughter, holding his child's wrists in her hands and flipping them front to back, front to back.

"What is it?" the mother asks, arms shaking as she lifts herself from the bed.

The midwife shakes her head, takes a step back from the baby. "She has no marks. She has none."

As the midwife rummages for her belongings, the father steps forward, cradling his daughter, his floret, his _Katniss_ in his arms. He rejoins his wife, balancing on the edge of the bed, and watches her grab hold of the baby's wrists and search. When she cries, the night scurries away into dawn.

:::

Peeta Mellark was born with the sun gleaming overhead and the name of a girl on their left wrist, the way it always is. Each night, before they tuck away into bed, they trace it with their finger, delicately, as if each letter were its own treasure. _Katniss Everdeen_ it spells, and they have never heard anything so beautiful.

:::

Though summer is still nigh, Katniss tugs her sleeves until they droop past her fingers. Before her rests a slice of bread folded around an array of squashes. A handful of berries are held together in a tied cloth beside it. Across the table, Madge nibbles on strawberries and sighs at the black mark across her left wrist, words long enough that it almost completely wraps around.

"I wonder who she is," Madge sighs, again, as she does every lunch with Katniss after failing to find her soul mate in the days between.

Katniss unwraps her berries, nodding absentmindedly as usual, as if she had important things to say on such a topic. As Madge sighs again, she wonders when her father will let her practice with his bow again, when she can roll up her sleeves in the safety of the forest, sit in the shallows of the lake. She wonders, very briefly, if she would want to have a soul mate such as Madge's to show her forest to, to teach to hunt and climb trees as she can.

Instead, her lips purse and she wraps her remaining berries up again, finishes her sandwich, and tugs her sleeves back down again.

:::

This is clockwork. Children in schoolyards sit cross-legged together, clapping hands to rhymes, sharing answers in the shade of the oak. Older kids share chores and paths home and kisses, sometimes, but other times secrets intermingled with laughs because a soul mate is anything. It's Peeta's brother and his boyfriend, kneading dough under clasped hands well through dawn. Or they're father and bookshop's owner, who reads them poems every Thursday at breakfast and laughs on the porch with their father when they head off to school.

So when Peeta tries to fathom why Katniss has never smiled at him or said hello, their head hurts, and they sit down, finger brushing across her name over and over, as if maybe they could change it, as if maybe they could breathe life into the mark.

But it doesn't change. But it stays six feet under.

:::

On a stage, muscles stiff but her head high, Katniss leans forward, blue sleeve baring the bottom of her palm, arm extended. Opposite, her fellow tribute, the one boy she owes everything, Peeta Mellark meets her halfway.

A blur of pink, the escort smiles, waves at the crowd, and ushers them apart the second after Katniss recoils, hands tucked above her waist. Her fingers pull frantically at her sleeves, but they're already taught.

Behind the cameras, as they're being pulled apart, she snatches at his wrist, lifts it to her eyes to be certain of what she believed she glimpsed.

"How did you get this?" she demands, stepping closer, his face grimacing as his wrist bends too far.

He almost answers, his lips parted, but the escort tsks and nudges them each aside, and with a twist of the door handle, shuts Katniss in.

:::

"I was born with it," they explain.

She's standing in Peeta's room, eyes switching from watching the carpet to glaring back at them. With a new glance to the wall, Katniss begins fumbling with the buttons on her sleeves, rolling them up, walking up to them and holding her palms toward their face.

"I wasn't born with any," she says. "No girls. No boys."

She lowers her left hand, flicking it to the side, with her words, but keeps her right up accusatorily, as if the blank wrist should offend them.

"Oh," Peeta whispers, thoughts branching like stars forming constellations. "Oh, I'm not either."

:::

In a different house, of white banisters and carpet, sits a girl weeping on the floor, the arms of her soul mate consoling her. There are things in the world and many of them are dark. Rain clouds and ashes and black boots and funerals and the fragile letters on Peeta's wrist. The blank canvas on hers.

So when it's bright inside, and the demons haven't any shadows to hide in, Peeta lays out their paints in the room of paper walls and easels, and creates stories over the veins in her wrists. A sunset to drive away the nightmares. A forest to remind her of home. An array of arrows pointed down her left arm, outcast from her heart.

The arrows pierce Peeta instead, as their brush breathes them life, and they've never been happier to belong so wholly to another.

Sometimes, they paint up her arms, too. Swirls of wind and leaves and colors.

Katniss confesses, once, how she hates washing it off at the end of the day, hates seeing the essences of Peeta flush down the drain. Because the art becomes her marks now, more vivid than anyone else's, stronger.

The terrors in the night can't take them from her anymore.

:::

 ** _fin_**

:::

 **a/n** **[** Written for Caesar's Palace's LGBT event. If anyone's wondering why I've given Peeta they/them pronouns, it's because I've made them agender for this fic and chosen those pronouns for them. If anyone is wondering why I refer to Peeta as he/him in one section, it's because that's Katniss' blurb, and she doesn't know about Peeta's pronouns. **]**


	2. So We Knotted Our Strings

**A soul mate AU in which** you feel a spark when you first see your soul mate.

 **The soul mates are** Johanna Mason and an OC.

:::

 **2 : Our Strings Were Merely Crossed so We Knotted Them**

:::

Under the midsummer glaze, the town is glowing. The people of Seven mill about, laughing and dancing, celebrating the solstice. Hidden in an alley at the far edge of the shops, Johanna Mason sits with her back pressed to one wall and her feet flat against the other. She's got her eyes on a Peacekeeper across the way; he won't stop leering at the girls playing with ribbons at the stoop of the candy shop.

He leans toward the girls, gesturing toward the shop, and Johanna stands up, is toeing out of the alley to get a closer look, when the sun blinds her. Spots dance across her eyelids as she turns to the side, lifting a hand to the wall to steady herself.

When she opens her eyes, other hand lifted to the side of her head to stall the evening rays, a spark rushes up her arms, straightens her spine, halts her mid-breath.

At first, she's stunned. Then she takes inventory. There are eight people she can count directly in her line of sight if she excludes children and the elderly. A well dressed young man, singing at the edge of a group barely in her sight. A shorter girl next to him, her hair tied back, chin tilted up to the sun. Three people kick a ball back and forth. Two others are talking to each other, one with hands in wild gestures, another laughing under her hand. Farthest away, chewing on a cookie with his feet kicking at the ground, a halo of light behind him, sits the last. And one of them is her soul mate.

"Shit," she mutters, glancing back at the Peacekeeper, ensuring he isn't causing harm, before walking up to the man sitting alone, almost wanting him to be her soul mate, so she can get it over with and tell him she's not interested in making friends. Not anymore.

She taps his shoulder when she reaches him, tilts up the corners of her lips into something akin to a smile. "Hello."

When he turns to her, his eyes are light, but fall when they reach her, grimacing. "Hi," he mutters, eyes darting away again. It's enough to tell it isn't him, to tell he only sees of her the fresh blood staining her hands, so Johanna moves on, touching his shoulder again gently as she passes, just to see him squirm.

"Hello," she greets the next, her smile a bit lower, having wandered to find her amongst the crowd now gathering around. She's beautiful, Johanna notes, and even greets her back with a smile, allows Johanna into her circle of friends to chat for a moment, and for the first time in months, the victor is reminded of a life before, when she came to the midsummer events with her family, begging for cakes in the windows, sucking on lollipops. It's almost a pity when she slips away, the girl waving behind her.

And so it goes, until she's walked circles around the town center, greeting seven of her eight, smiling biggest when she reached the last, feeling so certain, so happy, because they were smiling at her, too, so they must've _known_ , but it was only directed at the person behind her.

She remembers, now, why she doesn't come into town anymore.

The sun is setting when she retreats back to her alley, admitting defeat, the candy shop empty of the children, a sandwich from the bakery clasped in her hands.

"Excuse me," she mutters, already hitting shoulders with the girl leaning against the corner to the alley to let off steam, but the girl's hand settles on her forearm, warm fingers clinging hard enough to force her to turn around. The words are already on her lips, prepared to tell her to fuck off, when she smiles at Johanna and the world tilts, the sun blinking under the horizon.

"I'm your soul mate," she says.

:::

 _ **fin**_

:::

 **a/n [** This is a very vague, entirely just implied drabble about a pan Johanna. At least it's edited now? **]**


	3. My Heart Finds Yours with My Eyes Closed

**A soul mate AU in which** one soul mate has the location they will meet tattooed on their wrist, and the other has the date.

 **The soul mates are** Primrose Everdeen and Rue.

:::

 **3 : Only with Eyes Closed in Tandem Can My Heart Find Yours**

:::

They used to debate, sitting on the floor of the living room after dinner, which was better to know. Rue and her brothers face West, toward the bay just two miles away, backs against couches. Her other sisters sprawl across the floor in front of them, Amary, the youngest, lying across both of them, hands outstretched.

"Day!" she screeches, which, at age two, is her only contribution to the argument.

"Be _cause_ ," Mellia continues, lifting a giggling Amary from the ground, "you know exactly _when_!"

"But that's the worst part," Rue argues. "You'll have to wait decades until you meet yours, Mel. I could meet mine tomorrow."

Her brother laughs, poking her in the side. "And how are you going to get there?"

"You're supposed to be on my side, Ren!"

"Well, I mean, I could meet _my_ soul mate tomorrow," he says, waving his wrist and its inked _Pescadero_ , their hometown, in front of her. "So you aren't too terribly wrong."

"Or!" Mellia says. "Or, or, _or_ you could meet them when you're _shriveled_ and _old_!"

"Day!" Amary shrieks again.

Sometimes, late at night, Rue will touch her forehead to her window, the moments of that one night replaying in her mind, standing out from all the other nights. It never struck her so harsh before, the realization stinging and red. Not until Jessa woke up at four in the morning a few years ago, the current date etched on her wrist for the past twelve years.

Tonight, looking at the stars, she doesn't wave or promise or wish like all the years before, cocooned softly in the night. Tonight, Rue begs.

:::

The Golden Gate Bridge is, perhaps, Prim's favorite place to be. Behind her, her sister wrestles with the hood of her jacket in the wind, facing the street to avoid the brunt of the gusts, scowling.

"It's freezing, Prim, hurry up," she says, burrowing under her collar while Peeta, her boyfriend, laughs and leaves Prim's side to wrestle her into a hug.

Hands clasped under her chin, Prim smiles distantly but doesn't turn away from the water, gently ebbing below. When Peeta bribed them into visiting the de Young with him, stopping on the bridge was her only request. Her family had only come into San Francisco a few times over the years since they moved to Sacramento, and she'd been twice more on school trips, but something about this spot allured her, eased her mind no matter what the world was planning around her.

Today, the ever-present mark on her wrist was fighting for her attention, trying to poke past the blue of the waves. Only one more month, it reminded her, before a speedboat tumbled the waves once more and she lost herself in their trails.

"Okay," she resents after a few more moments, lifting her eyes to the horizon. "We can go."

:::

Her feet are bouncing on the dashboard, creating softs bumps when she kicks a little too hard, when her brother Jarred reaches over from the steering wheel with one hand, stills her knee. Blinking, Rue focuses on his fingers, tries to remember to breathe deeply, tries to remember to stop her nerves from taking over her.

"Will you _calm down_?" he asks lightly, grinning at her before taking back his hand.

"You offered to drive." Her knee twitches once without her consent, her foot slipping the tiniest bit forward before she tucks them into her chest. She attempts to sing along to the radio to further distract herself.

"Because you'd crash within two blocks of home trying to drive like this."

Counting this trip to attend her childhood friend's wedding, Rue has been to Sacramento thirteen times. The first was at her urging, at only five years old, desperate to see the location tattooed on her wrist with her own eyes. The previous seven were trips she made alone on Friday afternoons, the first of those the day after she got her license.

"It's just..." She pauses, trying to sum up her flurry of emotions into words.

"You're excited," Jarred suggests. "Desperate and hopeless and excited."

She leans over to hit his shoulder, and he laughs, and she goes back to singing.

When Jarred drops her off at her hotel two blocks down from the reception, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder, she falters. The city is familiar, like another home, yet she can't help but feel like she doesn't belong. The sun is still high in the sky, but she wishes on the stars despite.

:::

At eleven at night, secluded at a table in the back of the bar, Prim begins to cry. She'd spent the day up and about, starting with a run through the local park as the sun was still rising, spending a few hours window shopping and snacking in town, even stopped at Peeta's bakery to steal Katniss from him for company in the evening.

As she reaches for more napkins, the black ink on her wrist stops her, and she pulls back, folding her fingers over to try and hide the mark. She's studied it for years, memorized the curve of each number, doodled it again and again through her notebooks back in school. She daydreamed what kind of day it would be; the sun soft in the sky surrounded by wisps of clouds, the weather chilly enough for a jacket, yesterday's rain still in sidewalk cracks.

It wasn't pitch black, sticky beer on the table, the sound of glasses clinking in the background.

A sob chokes her, her spine curving as she leans to hide her face in the table, blindly reaching for napkins. As she wipes away the slowing tears, traces of mascara intermingled with them, her phone pings, Katniss' name on the screen.

 _How was it?_ Prim reads. _Tell me everything._

The time is 11:35. Her tears start to spill over again.

"Are you okay?" Someone taps on her shoulder. "Do you, uh, need anything?"

"No, thank you," she mumbles, glancing up. A girl her age stands at the edge of her table, her smile warm and friendly, and Prim finds herself captivated by this stranger, the warmth in the hand still on her shoulder, and somehow, ends up spilling to her what a mess of a day she's had. By the end, she's slid over in her booth, the girl, Rue, sitting next to her, rubbing her shoulder.

By the time she's done, Prim has run out of tears, yet her lungs still shake every now and then. In front of her, her phone displays the time as 12:01, and her breath hitches. Reality crashes down on her for a moment, her hands shaking.

"I'm sorry," she says, turning to Rue. "I don't know what I was thinking. You probably have better places to be."

To her surprise, Rue laughs, leans back, and takes her hand from Prim's shoulder, rolling up the sleeve to reveal her wrist. "Actually, you might've just made my night."

:::

And sometimes it's nights like these, curled on the couch, Prim's blond hair draped across Rue's lap, and she snores under the music of the rolling credits. Leaning forward for the remote, Rue accidentally elbows her girlfriend in the head, pausing wide eyed as Prim scrunches her nose before resuming her soft snores.

She smiles and wiggles, slowly, until she's lying down beside Prim, her arms locked around her.

"Is the movie over?" Prim mutters, only half awoken from Rue's shuffling.

Rue leans forward, kisses her forehead. "Yes, darling. Goodnight."

:::

 _ **fin**_

:::

 **a/n [** This was going to be so muCH GAYER but I ran out of time and patience. Perhaps I will come back to it someday. And yes, Rue's siblings are all named after flowers are you going to judge me for it? **]**


	4. Loving You Is the Only Good Thing I Do

**A soul mate AU in which** you only see in muted colors until you touch your soul mate.

 **The soul mates are** Gale Hawthorne and Madge Undersee.

:::

 **4 : And if Loving You Is the Only Good Thing I Do I'll Have Conquered**

:::

"You are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," Gale whispers, her fingers playing with Madge's.

And Madge smiles, grateful for the compliment, scoots over on the bed to kiss her, but as she leans back and gazes at the stars, she can't help but tally everything more beautiful than she.

The stars are exquisite, of course, but Madge has always found beauty in daylight, in the reflections of sunlight off windows and blades of grass, shiny and yellow and free.

She can almost remember a time before Gale, when Katniss had introduced her briefly as they waved and passed, barely meeting. The sky was still a dull blue back then, her dress a dark pink. But as the weeks past, and they met again, her leg pressing against Gale's when she sat, Madge closed her eyes against the sudden brightness. When kids ask her what it's like, the difference, since she met her soul mate, she can only shake her head in bewilderment. "It's something you can never go back to," she tells them.

The flowers blooming every summer in the meadow, with their vibrant pinks and reds and yellows, dusted with pollen and honeybees, always ended up following her home in a bed of her hair. Even when she was a child, she was enamored with their color, their scent, like sweet candy from her grandmother's shop.

When she closes her eyes, she's left with sound, the smooth keys underneath her fingertips and she plays the piano, up the scales, down the scales, then in rhythm. She loves teaching others, setting her fingers over there's to teach them the position of their hands, the delicacy in playing the piano. There was a time when her mother played, creating melodies with her eyes closed, humming along, but now all that's left is Madge stumbling through written notes and singing off key.

Across from her, eyes closed, Gale sleeps, hair falling over her eyes. Though she knows that within darkness, the eyes only pick up the world in greys, she's never seen anything more luminous, never cherished anything more.

"Then you mustn't own a mirror," Madge whispers.

:::

 _ **fin**_

:::

 **a/n [** A trans!Gale AU bc Madge is gay sry I don't make the rules. **]**


End file.
